MotteInTheEye
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User ID: 578
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
Great post, but I think the pattern you briefly mentioned at the end bears a much deeper examination.
Red Tribe America is not actually very fit at all, while Blue Tribe power centers consistently have quite a few fitness-minded individuals.
This really understates the phenomenon. As a conservative from a blue tribe stronghold, my visits to red tribe strongholds like the deep south are extremely disillusioning. It's hard to overstate what a dramatic difference there is in the obesity levels everywhere you go. And this in turn leads to much higher consumption of public health resources.
It's hard to square these realities with common sense arguments which ring true to me, like the ones you made above. It doesn't seem debatable that self-sufficiency is more a red tribe value than a blue tribe value - so why are blue tribe individuals, as a class, more self-sufficient when it comes to diet and health?
There are a number of explanations you could hypothesize: maybe personal belief in the importance of self-sufficiency is irrelevant in a system that doesn't incentivize it. Maybe if you controlled for poverty / IQ the differences are explained or the sign of the correlation flips. Maybe it's a Simpsons paradox thing where within a given region, right-wing beliefs are correlated with fitness, but the correlation doesn't hold across the whole population. But it feels like it's crying out for some sort of explanation.
MotteInTheEye
11mo ago
He expanded the death penalty. True pro-lifers are against that.
I predict that support for abortion and support for the death penalty have a strong negative correlation. Do you predict the opposite or is there some other meaning to your claim?
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
It all depends on what the point of saying "America was built on slavery" is. My impression is that the goal of this movement is to establish that the USA's extraordinary economic prowess and status as the premier world power is due to (would not have existed without) its early reliance on slavery, rather than to its unique founding principles or constitution. If this is true, then the case for forfeiting its those founding principles to atone for the evils of slavery through e.g. reparations or affirmative action is strengthened.
MotteInTheEye
7mo ago
When my Dad was 16 or 17 (on the eve of the first OPEC embargo), he worked for summer and bought an old Cadillac. Today, not only is no job you do at 17 going to pay you enough to buy a decent car, a 'decent car' (that you buy with parental support, even) is going to be a 2000s Camry or equivalent highly functional, probably Japanese or Korean vehicle designed for middle class parents like your mom and dad.
I don't think I understand this part of your comment. I think you could buy either a very functional but uncool car like you describe, or a cooler car requiring maintenance along the lines of the old Cadillac, for $5k or so, which seems pretty achievable for a conscientious teenager to earn in three months at post-pandemic entry-level wages.
MotteInTheEye
6mo ago
It seems like what you are really asking is "why are people acting like this is solely an ethnic Jewish/Arab conflict when Egypt is at least partially cooperating with Israel against Gaza." Because all of your questions are easy things answer if ethnicity isn't the only lens you use to look at the conflict. Egypt and Israel would both rather not have this impoverished and violent population incorporated into or freely mingling with their own people, and they act accordingly.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I'm trying to wrap my head around what you are saying about the last sentence, you're saying that there is one word which expresses "switching channels will get you in trouble"? Or is the "switching channels" part just implied from context in the original Russian phrasing?
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I don't understand what the motivation behind attempts to have it scrubbed would be. Any enemy agents worth worrying about already have copies of it. So the only benefit of scrubbing it now would be making it harder for the public to find. Is there stuff in there that's just uncomfortable for the Pentagon to have widely known, or is it just an attempt to downplay the story by making the evidence harder to find?
MotteInTheEye
10mo ago
For shipwrecks, the captain would certainly bear a lot of the responsibility. I don't know how rare captains getting murdered during shipwrecks was historically though.
MotteInTheEye
17d ago
It seems like a progressive sales would inherently require tying your identity to every purchase, which seems like a huge inconvenience and a tough sell from a privacy perspective.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
For 5, what's your explanation for why their reported numbers are shooting up now? To me it always seemed likely that they were covering up their real numbers but I don't see why they would stop that now, whereas if they were telling the truth and have a mostly COVID-naive population then it would make sense that at some point they would have to pay the piper.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
By removing a small number of people from the streets we can have a drastic reduction in crime.
I think this is plausible but doesn't follow inevitably from the rest. Presumably the progressive response would be that the societal niche exists independently of the specific person who ends up filling it. Consider an analogous claim that, because 1% of people (fast food workers) do 90% of the deep frying in the US, we could improve obesity stats by removing a small number of people from the streets.
Your prediction is a useful one to distinguish between these hypotheses, but also hard to differentiate from a deterrent effect making crime less attractive (which we would also expect to see if we arrested all fast food workers).
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
When Jesus returns to Earth in The Grand Inquisitor he doesn't save the righteous or establish the kingdom of heaven, no Russian would've bought that, least of all Dostoevsky.
Is The Grand Inquisitor typically interpreted as being representative of Dostoevsky's views? My read has always been that Ivan represents the secular philosophy that Dostoevsky opposes.
MotteInTheEye
9mo ago
Oh, I've read that African billionaire thing a lot through secondary sources but I'm not on Twitter, what was the nature of the debunking?
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
They are performative in the sense that they don't result in any legislative action, but like you I think they are warranted and will be fascinating.
MotteInTheEye
11d ago
The one doesn't take away from the other. All those kids that love the Narnia series wouldn't have been reading "Transposition" if the Narnia books had been less popular.
MotteInTheEye
29d ago
I had completely forgotten that that place existed. I think they could have had a much more interesting arc if the moderator drama at the outset hadn't dampened their early momentum.
MotteInTheEye
6mo ago
The Venn diagram overlap of the sort of people who administrate hobby groups and the sort of people who bird watch is not your most testosterone-fueled set.
MotteInTheEye
9mo ago
For me at least, this is just a change within the last few months. Up until then my Facebook feed was exclusively activity of my friends, groups I had joined, and pages I had liked (even if it was stuff like "Bob liked a post in Nature Pics") and ads. Now it's probably 60% meme posts from random pages that I've never interacted with.
MotteInTheEye
11mo ago
Seems plausible enough to me, but I guess your point is that it's in tension with the overall progressive stance that suicides are helpless victims.
MotteInTheEye
11mo ago
I hadn't realized that DeSantis is a Catholic so I will cede your characterization of him in particular as not living up to the ideals he professes in that regard. I think your insistence on using "true pro-lifers" to refer to the Catholic position is obnoxious but there's no point in an extended argument about a label.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I don't think that's quite the whole story because without weight classes, you wouldn't watch a big buy beat up a little guy, you just wouldn't have a little guy in boxing at all.
There might be multiple factors involved, because most sports have a women's version at the top levels, and they obviously have developmental levels like high school and college because otherwise you don't have a pipeline of new players, but not as many have "pro, but not as good" levels which would correspond to boxing weight classes. There's no "short guys" NBA.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I do think the median republican is more able to have a civilized political conversation with his ideological opposites than the median democrat
I understand the sentiment that this metric is supposed to point to, but the metric itself doesn't seem coherent. The ideological opposite of the median Republican is the median Democrat, so unless you have some asymmetrical concept of a civilized political conversation, this can't be the case.
MotteInTheEye
13d ago
But they and all the big tech companies have stamped out this sort of question precisely because of the chilling effect of the law. You can obviously make a case that it's related to job performance, but their legal departments prefer to stick to coding and behavioral questions where the case is self-explanatory.
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
I'm not convinced by OP's arguments either, mainly because as others have pointed out it's trivial for the community to define a bar that earns respect regardless of what settings the game allows. But this is going too far. It's reasonable and inevitable to seek a more objective lens on an achievement that feels substantial to you by comparing it to what others can do / have done. It's easy to say "measure yourself by yourself - if you sink 200 hours into beating easy mode because your thumbs just won't cooperate like a normal person's then you can be just as proud of that". But the failure mode there is that we are liable to deceive ourselves and let ourselves off the hook too easily if our only standard is subjective difficulty.
There's no doubt that plenty on the right are going after Taylor Swift in cringey and conspiracy-minded ways. But I don't get Hanania's idea that she and her fans should be natural allies for the right. She's the icon of modern feminism.
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